“In December 1924, a postal inspector from Corinth, Miss., leveled a series of charges against the postmaster at the University of Mississippi. “You mistreat mail of all classes,” he wrote, “including registered mail; … you have thrown mail with return postage guaranteed and all other classes into the garbage can by the side entrance,” and “some patrons have gone to this garbage can to get their magazines.”

The slothful postmaster was William Faulkner. He had accepted the position in 1921 while trying to establish himself as a writer, but he spent most of his time in the back of the office, as far as possible from the service windows, in what he called the “reading room.” When he wasn’t reading or writing there he was playing bridge with friends; he would rise grumpily only when a patron rapped on the glass with a coin.

It was a brief career. Shortly after the inspector’s complaint, Faulkner wrote to the postmaster general: “As long as I live under the capitalistic system, I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.”

"And this is more or less all that I had left after the holidays. Nothing really; hopeless confusion, a narrative without a possible conclusion, full of doubtful meanings, belied by the very elements that I had to give it shape. I didn't know the significance of what I'd seen, I was repelled by the idea of finding out and being sure. All that counts is that I felt at peace when I finished writing, certain I had enjoyed the greatest success one can expect from this kind of task: I had accepted a challenge, and turned at least one daily defeat into a victory." (Onetti)

"A resounding adventure was that of my cannon, and happy am I to recall it." (Arlt)

"We had the experience but missed the meaning,/ An approach to the meaning restores the experience." (TS Eliot)

"How much better the poor man would be if he devoted himself to reading. Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions. Writing, meanwhile, is almost always empty." (Bolaño)

“The words outlive me, because in a certain sense I am irrelevant to them.” (Blanchot)

“I understood it all clearly, as if it were one of those things that one learns once and for all as a child, something that words can never explain.” (Onetti)

"I’m not crazy, one thing is certain, though… I know that life will always be extraordinarily beautiful for me. I don’t know whether other people will experience the force of life as I do, but inside me there is joy, a full, unconscious kind of joy. Everything surprises me. Sometimes I have the feeling that it’s just an hour since I arrived on earth, and everything is flaming new, fresh, beautiful." (Arlt)

"Love, poetry, gratitude toward life, toward books, and toward the world would send an electrical charge through the blue sinews of my soul... It wasn’t me, but the god inside me, a god fashioned from pieces of mountain, forest, sky and memory." (Arlt)

"It was perhaps superficially more striking that one could live if one would; but it was more appealing, insinuating, irresistible, in short, that one would live if one could." (Henry James)

"Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” (Joyce)

"She always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day." (Virginia Woolf)

"We must establish ourselves in the present once more.” (Cortázar)

"Sooner or later, I thought, I am going to become a great writer, but in the meantime I should have adventures. And I thought that everything that happened to me, no matter how idiotic, was a way of accumulating that depth of experience on which I assummed great writers built their work… what can one have in life but two or three experiences? All of us invent a variety of stories (ultimately versions of the same story) so as to imagine that something has happened to us in the course of our lives: a story or series of stories that ultimately are all that we really have lived, stories we tell ourselves so as to imagine that we have had experiences or that something meaningful has happened to us. But who can guarantee that the order of the story is that of life?” (Piglia)

"These are different times, Nicolas, and this is a time for a bigger undertaking. When you’re trying to change important things, then you realize that a short story, a novel, aren’t worth it and won’t satisfy you. Beautiful bourgeois art! They taught us that it was the supreme spiritual value. But when you have people who gave their lives, and continue to, literature is no longer your loyal and sweet lover—it’s a cheap whore. There are times when … every spectator is a coward or a traitor. This might be a pain for the more intimate questions of the soul but that’s the time we’re living in.” (Rodolfo Walsh)

"It still seems impossible to me that anyone, no matter how much he read, could’ve read every book in the world. There must be so many of them, and I don’t mean every single book, good and bad, just the good ones. There must be stacks of them! Enough so you could spend twenty-four hours a day reading! And that’s not to mention the bad ones, since there must be more bad ones than good ones… Neither of those things is possible." (Bolaño)

"The concern of the intellectual is by definition the conscience. An intellectual who fails to understand what is happening in his time and in his country is a walking contradiction, and those who understand but do nothing will have a place reserved in the anthology of tears but not in the living history of their land." (Rodolfo Walsh)

“This I say is the present moment; this is the first day of the summer holidays. This is part of the emerging monster to whom we are attached.” (Virginia Woolf)

"The truth was obscure, too profound and too pure / To live it you have to explode." (Bob Dylan)

"Back then, I'd reached the age of twenty / and I was crazy. / I'd lost a country / but won a dream. / As long as I had that dream / nothing else mattered. / Not working, not praying / not studying in the morning light / alongside the romantic dogs. / And the dream lived on in the void of my spirit... / A dream within another dream. / And the nightmare telling me: you will grow up. / You'll leave behind the images of pain and of the labyrinth / and you'll forget. / But back then, growing up would have been a crime. / I'm here, I said, with the romantic dogs / and here I'm going to stay." (Bolaño)

"Escribirá porque sí, porque no tendrá más remedio que hacerlo, porque es su vicio, su pasión y su desgracia. / A writer will write just because; because he or she has no other option; because it’s their vice, their passion and their misfortune." (Onetti)

“Sometimes writing is a job: obliquely tracing the path of certain ideas that seem indispensable to us, that we have to set down. But other times it’s a question of conceding what remains, accepting the museum and contemplating the balance while awaiting death, asking forgiveness of the sea for whatever was fucked up.” (Alvaro Enrigue)